


Who, me?

by kumatt



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:15:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27585307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kumatt/pseuds/kumatt
Summary: Prompt:“Your peers start to leave you alone and actively avoid you. They seem... scared of you. In fact, everyone does”A day in the life of an office worker. Sometimes your week starts out bad and just gets worse.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1
Collections: Spook Me Up Inside





	Who, me?

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the 2020 Halloween Gift Exchange from Write Me Up Inside.
> 
> This is a gift for Une Triste Chat

Vance made his way to the kitchenette and fretted. It was only 10:30 on Monday and he already felt like he'd started his week off on the wrong foot. And he didn't even know how. He slumped around the corner into the tiny kitchen, slotted his mug into the coffee machine and hit the button. It began moaning and grinding its teeth in its usual way. Vance tipped his head forward, tempted to just lean forward and collapse into the wall.

Saurab walked by and Vance waved, perhaps awkwardly. How do you properly make contact with a friend (but not super close friend) who's walking nearby (but not too near). Saurab seemed to miss the gesture, which was just as well. Vance turned back and caught a glimpse of the back of Lisa's head as she puttered down the opposite corridor.

Vance felt the little wheels in his head spin down. The tiny engine in his head that prepared smalltalk and considered what sorts of trivial personal anecdotes could be shared if needed. He could almost imagine an audible whine as this tiny aftermarket clockwork, necessitated by corporate life, kicked into action and granted him plausible cover as a regular adult human.

Not that Vance disliked other people. Saurab was great. Lisa was really funny. It would have been nice to chat with them. Taxing, but nice.

Steam wafted from Vance’s mug as he negotiated his way back to his desk through tasteful corridors and his own neighbourhood of programmer workstations, painted all white and somehow sterile and shabby at the same time. Lisa and Saurab weren’t back at their desks yet. Lucas probably wasn’t in yet. Sophia was maybe out sick. Talvin and Francis were the only othe folks in their “pod”. Vance would have tried to manage a curt nod, but they seemed to be heads down already.

Vance sat down at his desk, woke up his computer and tried to resist the many feeds, notifications and pings eager to distract him indefinitely. He took a sip of his coffee to stall for time, knowing he was powerless against distractors of this magnitude. The last refuge of the procrastinator is to try and drag others down with him. Vance decided it would be neighbourly to ask Talvin how his weekend was. He tore his eyes off his twitter feed.

“So, how was-” but Talvin was just ducking around the corner out of the room. Francis was gone too. A deep dark chill gripped at Vance’s heart. Have I forgotten about a meeting? He brought up his work calendar and convinced it that today would be a good day to display. No meeting. Not for a couple hours anyway. Vance relaxed into his chair and switched back to Twitter. Just for a bit.

The 10:30 meeting rolled around and shame mingled with relief as Vance flipped his laptop shut and made his way to the meeting room. He’d barely started in on his work, but now he had an excuse. He’d be more productive after lunch.

Jeff and Lydia glanced up at Vance as he rounded the doorway into the poshly but inoffensively appointed meeting room, like all meeting rooms in the office. This was the 19th-century-botanical-illustrations room.

Vance settled into a chair with the comfortable smugness of knowing that while he was late, he wasn’t the last one to arrive. Talvin and Francis, wherever they had gone off to, were absent.

But then the meeting room screen flicked on and there they were. Their faces appearing over the teleconference software from some undisclosed locations.

Lydia extracted status updates from all participants and the meeting along. Vance’s mind wandered. What was up with Talvin and Francis? Why go to the trouble of fighting with the video conferencing software when they were evidently in another posh meeting room in the same building. Vance didn’t recognize the decor, but the muted, tasteful colours and the theme of Victorian bicycles made it obvious.

The meeting ended and Vance decided to go on an adventure. It was 11:30, not enough time to get into the zone and get anything done before it was time for lunch, and the mystery of the bicycle room nagged at Vance. Had Talvin and Francis been recruited to work on some pet project with the CEO and they couldn’t get away? Whatever it was, they hadn’t invited Vance, which was fine, but still… getting to the bottom of this minor mystery was about 10,000 times more interesting than culling automated emails and following up on support tickets.

The brand new, minimalist office building was dominated by Vance’s company, occupying eight of its ten floors. The bottom two belonged to the satellite office of some anonymous publishing conglomerate. Vance had already taken himself on fairly extensive walkabouts of his office space. He was proud of his extensive mental map of good quiet places to think, work, space out or gossip. Up until now he was sure he’d catalogued the twee decor themes of every office they had. But vintage bicycles was a new one. That he’d somehow failed to fully explore the office nagged at him almost as much as the mystery of his absent coworkers.

In a burst of ambition, and because the elevator area seemed too busy, Vance decided to take the stairs. Starting at his floor and going up, he did a quick circuit, and floor by floor he confirmed that he had indeed left no corner unexplored. At the top floor he resisted the urge to switch to the elevator and found a different stairwell to take down. This was the least convenient stairwell, which suited Vance, because he was still out of breath from his climb and was happy to not run into anyone.

Climbing down, Vance let his mind wander as he descended past each floor he'd already explored. He reminded himself that he should feel guilty for wasting company time. He mourned the shortness of his weekend and how he'd frittered that time away. He started to speculate about what he might each for lunch.

He snapped out of his reverie when the door at the floor below swung open and some unknown employee stepped out into the stairwell. They had an awkward moment of mutual surprise and then Vance nodded at the anonymous person and ducked through the door, just to resolve the situation before small talk could happen.

Vance started wandering around the floor he'd arrived at and realized he'd lost track of floors. His whole floor-exploring system had fallen apart at the sudden appearance of the rando. He checked his phone and saw that he'd only spent ten minutes of the thirty he was trying to kill. He felt the defensibility of this time-wasting sap away inside him and decided to find a place on whichever floor this was and just do at least some work before it was time for lunch.

He rounded the corner to the spot of the floorplan that would have had some pseudo-mid century lounge furniture and attractive potted plants on a typical floor of his office, and found that this floor was different. It was one of the floors that had partitioned off part of its square footage for some other means.

Vance was not feeling primed with the confidence necessary to push open the windowless door that would have allowed him past the featureless wall and into the rest of the floor. Sometimes these spaces were just quirks of the building's architecture and some nice seating with cafe atmosphere was beyond. Other times it was a cleanroom for some manufacturing thing or some other thing where uninvited nobodies from elsewhere in the company were not welcome. Without knowing which floor he was on it just wasn't worth the risk.

Vance found a small nook with a stool and a counter facing out a window, cracked open his laptop and rallied to get that token modocum of productivity under his belt.

Some time passed. Vance felt the stirrings of virtue as he realized he might actually have distracted himself into actually focusing and doing real, useful work. Some sound had broken him out of the zone and he looked around to see what was up.

Naturally, his eyes went to the mystery door first, so he caught just a glimpse of Talvin and Francis leaving. Probably going for lunch themselves.

Vance knew those two didn't work on anything that would necessitate a clean room, or anything else that would plausibly need to exclude him, Vance reasoned, already folding up his laptop and making his way to the door. They work on what I work on, he rationalized. They probably just discovered an obscure enclave within the office and were savouring the novelty of having it to themselves. Maybe this is that second lounge management keeps promising.

Now fully expecting to find a hidden oasis on the other side, Vance fobbed his security thing on the ever-present door locks and pushed the door open.

His heart sank. What he found beyond was more office. More handsome leather chairs. More tasteful plants. More decorated meeting rooms. Worry crept back into his mind that this was some special place that he shouldn’t be, but then he spotted a print with an antique bicycle through the glass door of a meeting room and remembered his original mission. If he wasn’t supposed to be here, he could always say he just didn’t know, which was true anyway.

Vance wandered around feeling sheepish but somehow pot committed to the exercise. It really was just regular office. Some quirk of the building design meant that this half of the floor had no windows, and the lighting had a subdued quality that Vance hadn't noticed before in other parts of the building, but it actually seemed appealing. Maybe this slightly half-lit atmospheric vibe was all it took to lure Talvin and Francis down here.

Vance glanced in each meeting room and in each pod, but to his relief there wasn nobody around. Probably all out at lunch.

At the end of the corridor was one last windowless door. The type that would lead into either an executive office or a pleasant sunny solarium overlooking the city. Something compelled him to push on before he could talk himself out of it.

He swiped his fob and the light went red. The door didn't unlock. The spell broke and Vance relaxed. The lock was doing its job. Keeping him from blundering into a server room or product prototyping workshop or some other thing. The mystery wasn’t so much solved as evaporating. Vance realized he was hungry. His shoulders relaxed and he turned to walk back out how he got in. Something caught his eye on the door. He’d wondered if there would be some helpful label explaining what was on the other side, and at first he hadn’t spotted anything, but now he saw the faint imprint where stick on letters had been.

VANCE

Vance squinted at the faint shapes. Waiting for them to spell something else.

As he waited, his heart began to race. He looked around him, sure he was about to get caught, yet totally unclear what he would be caught doing. He glance away and looked back, sure the letters would be gone, or spell "JANITOR" or something, but no.

VANCE

He tried his keycard again. It blinked red. He looked at the letters. He ran his fingers over the faint marks where glue had held the actual letters on. The fine, catch of the adhesive on his fingertips somehow flipped a switch in him.

It was real.

Vance knocked on the door. Nobody answered, but the door did budge. It must not have closed properly after the last person had passed through. Vance grabbed the handle and pushed, swinging the door in and following in after it.

Inside was one of his company's cleanrooms.

Bright lights lit a spotless white floor.

Cables descended from cable trays that criss-crossed above his head. Work benches with laptops and more obscure technology flanked a central area that seemed to be the locus of all the various cabling. A nexus of piping and cabling ran into a spherical device of polished steel, barely visible below access ports, taped on sensors, bolted on devices and support structures. It mesmerized him.

Vance wandered throughout the space in a trance. His company researched new chip manufacturing techniques and he was vaguely aware that laboratories like this might exist. It had never interested him. Seeing it now he had no solid reason to find fault with any of it. He had no idea what a lab that researched new silicon doping techniques or whatever would look like. Maybe it was just seeing something so exotic mixed with all the familiar, mundane accoutrements of his regular office life. The ubiquitous, identical laptops. The branded coffee mugs. The very expensive chairs. Maybe it was just that, except what it really was was a room with Vance’s name written on the door, he reminded himself.

He tried logging into one of the laptops but of course he didn’t know anyone’s passwords.

Vance paced around the room, increasingly agitated. This weird room was either a sinister secret lab tied to some dark machinations directed at him, or it was basically nothing. The more time he spent in there, the further apart those poles grew, and yet he always found himself unresolved between them.

Most difficult was that if it was the bad thing, it still didn't actually explain what it was. Vance searched his memories for any sign that dark conspiracies had been out to get him. Failing that, he tried to think of any reason why dark conspiracies might even be interested in him in the first place. Drawing a blank, he collapsed into a chair in the corner. He resented its obnoxious ergonomics and leaned back as far as he could, craning his head all the way back so he was taking in the room upside down.

Vance was looking at the entrance to the lab upside down when the door opened.

Talvin, Francis, and Saurab walked in. They were wrapping up some fun lunchtime conversation.

They were halfway across the room, walking away from Vance before he realized they hadn't noticed him there. The mash of dread, resentment, shame and confusion snarled inside him.

He stood, unsure if it was to confront them or to slink away, but as he pushed himself awkardly out of his deep slouch, the chair kicked away and crashed noisily into the wall. The faces of the three men shot up and their eyes went wide. They bolted for the door.

It led Vance in an unexpected direction. Their flight response triggered his fight response. He raced them to the door, all wordless, still unsure what he even wanted. Talvin and Francis escaped before he could ask, but Saurab had been one workstation further away, and Vance got to the door first. He slammed it shut and barred its path. Saurab skittered to a halt in front of him, frantic.

"Vance..." said Saurab. He'd clearly expected that he would have more to say after that, but nothing came.

"Saurab," said Vance. “What is that?” he gestured at the steel sphere.

“It’s uh, kind of like a quantum computer,” said Saurab, who couldn’t quite meet Vance’s gaze.

The mash of feelings simplified into straight forward anger. He flexed his hands and struggled with the urge to start smashing things. “Say. More.”

“We call it a quantum condenser. We’ve been experimenting with them for years. It’s sort of like running quantum uncertainty in reverse. It's…” Saurab glanced briefly at Vance and seemed to read the scene. He held his hands up. “It changes reality.”

“Saurab listen,” said Vance. He felt his anger already cooling. “Maybe I’m just having a bad Monday, but it seems like everyone is avoiding me and I think my name used to be written on this door, and I just want you to tell me that it’s just nothing. That it’s not- I feel stupid even saying it out loud… it’s nothing to do with me, right? You’re planning to do something to me, right?”

Saurab let out a long breath. “Look,” he said at last. “It’s not like that, ok. It’s already running and it’s, uh, fine. We’re just running an experiment, and you know how this stuff is. It’s like 10% science and 90% paperwork.

“I really don’t know how this stuff is, because I don’t know what this stuff is,” said Vance. “And I I wish you would hurry up and cure me of my conspiracy theory. And what do you mean it’s already running. Now I feel even worse. Like what, you’re experimenting on me?”

“No,” said Saurab, pulling up a seat as if suddenly tired. “It’s not an experiment on you. The experiment is you. That thing is on right now, and it’s making you exist in this world.”

“But this building is only seven years old,” said Vance, trying to find purchase on anything. “Hell, you all are younger than me. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s now how it works. We didn’t turn this thing on 38 years ago. We turned it on this morning.”

Vance stared at the machine, wanting it to somehow divulge why this wasn’t so.

“That makes even less sense,” he said at last, weakly.

“It changes reality,” said Saurab, his voice lower. “At 7:43am this morning, we turned it on, and it changed the world so that you were in it, and had always been in it. Everything about you is now a true, natural part of the cosmos. Well maybe not natural…”

Vance found the nearest chair and sat down. He propped his elbows on the desk in front of him and felt very weary.

“If that…” Vance couldn’t bring himself to repeat what ‘that’ was. “If that is true, then… then isn’t it a paradox? How can you know about a machine that you built in a world where I didn’t exist? Shouldn’t your brains have been changed along with the rest of reality?”

“Yes,” said Saurab. “And we don’t know why. It’s why it’s been hard seeing you. I remember working with you for four years, but I also remember that you didn’t exist yesterday.”

They sat in silence, staring at the floor between them.

“It’s nuts. But I guess, one thing that’s safe to say, is just ‘fuck you’,” Vance said it without any venom. “Either all of this is true, and fuck you, or this is a ridiculous prank, and fuck you.”

Saurab nodded in a “fair enough” sort of way.

“Well, the obvious next step is to shut it down,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound like something I’d want,” said Vance.

“If we collapse the quantum field, it’s not going to unmake you or whatever. It just means the experiment ends. We’ll stop getting data. I bet we’ll stop having this weird double image too. You’ll just be here.”

“Ok, I’ve changed my mind, from my point of view that sounds like going back to normal. And then we can forget this ever happened, which should be easy, because this is insane.”

Saurab, wheeled over to his computer and began typing and clicking. “This is actually the easy part. We just shut it down. It should resolve all the uncertainty into the world with you in it. We’ll all forget we did this, and how to do it again. The lab will disappear too. We had hoped to work on this a little longer. Try to figure out a way to pass on information to our future selves, but we hadn’t planned on how weird it would be to see you and now, well, I just want this to be done and to just have a regular shitty office job with you!”

Saurab clicked through a couple more things, entered his password a couple times, and then the soft humming that Vance hadn’t really noticed before began to fade.

In an instant, he was at lunch. He was enjoying a healthy bowl of Asian fusion noodles and looking out at the traffic. He felt guilty for taking a long lunch on a Monday, but Vance had always held the value of a quiet, relaxing lunch as sacrosanct and the guilt did not persist.

In the next instant, everything was exactly the same, but now Vance remembered what had just been true. The weird morning. The weird walled off part of the office. The weird lab. The machine. The experiment. The truth.

He dropped his disposable bamboo chopsticks.

Vance dodged through traffic and sprinted up the stairwell to the floor of his office that he’d found before. It was as he expected it, except there was no wall. Normal, mundane office space continued in all directions. He went to the end of the floor, where the “VANCE” door had been. He found an unmarked door and flung it open. Two co-workers looked up from their conversation. They were sitting in a sunny cafe-like lounge, enjoying a couple coffees and sharing a laptop. It was just as Vance remembered it, he realized. Except also totally different.

Saurab breezed past Vance in the doorway and headed for a fridge full of bottles of juice. “Hey Vance, how was the weekend?”

Vance smiled awkwardly and left the way he’d come in without saying anything.

It was like Saurab had said, it had all been settled. Except for Vance himself. Now he knew. Somehow he knew that it had happened. He found a tasteful leather lounge chair beside an expensive fern and sat down heavily.

Another wave of reality washed over him. The memory, somehow, of the world before he existed. The desk that was empty. The parents who never met. The whole, unmolested reality. And then it happened again, another, earlier world. Another lab. Another confused person. But this time someone else. Saurab. And then the realities came into his mind faster and faster.

When Vance felt dizzy with countless layers of mangled reality, he realized he was remembering the first change. The first time anyone had come into being in this way. It was someone he didn’t really know. Some obscure member of the executive team. But there was no lab. The person just came into being, evidently of their own will.

And the layer before that was different. Vance saw not the world before this person had arrived, but the world they came from. A place of no dimension or rule. A place of cacophony and torment without relief. Vance understood somehow that that original soul had laboured there for countless eons to craft their escape into the material world.

And Vance saw also in that world the souls of every other person who had been brought in later, including himself, formless and in agony. And beyond all of them, a sea of others, all still unsaved.

And Vance knew that nobody else here knew. And soon even he would forget. And he would have to start learning about how to build a quantum condenser.


End file.
